Climate geoengineering uses technology to temporarily reduce the effects of climate change by reflecting a small portion of sunlight back to space. As recently reported in Environmental Research Letters, an international ...

Scientists from the University of Aberdeen have delved to the bottom of an arctic lake in order to chart the effects of climate change over the past 10,000 years in an effort to better understand global warming.

For the first time, a research team has been able to reconstruct the solar activity at the end of the last ice age, around 20,000-10,000 years ago, by analysing trace elements in ice cores in Greenland and cave formations ...

Federal wildlife officials are withdrawing proposed protections for the snow-loving wolverine—a reversal that highlights lingering uncertainties over what a warming climate means for some temperature-sensitive species.

They are ice, they are rain—and sometimes in-between. Mixed-phase clouds, ubiquitous in the Arctic, are an enigma for scientists trying to understand their role in affecting the climate. In a study led by Dr. Mikhail Ovchinnikov ...

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show global temperature trends over the last 10,000 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Zhengyu Liu knew that ...

Scientists have uncovered key attributes of so-called "brown carbon" from wildfires, airborne atmospheric particles that may have influenced current climate models that failed to take the material's warming effects into account. ...

(Phys.org) —Aerosols, tiny particles in the atmosphere, play a significant role in Earth's climate, scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight and affecting the formation and properties of clouds. Currently, the effect ...

Climate model

Climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate.

All climate models take account of incoming energy as short wave electromagnetic radiation (which in this context means visible and ultraviolet, not to be confused with shortwave) to the earth as well as outgoing energy as long wave (infrared) electromagnetic radiation from the earth. Any imbalance results in a change in the average temperature of the earth.

The most talked-about models of recent years have been those relating temperature to emissions of carbon dioxide (see greenhouse gas). These models project an upward trend in the surface temperature record, as well as a more rapid increase in temperature at higher altitudes.

Models can range from relatively simple to quite complex:

This is not a full list; for example "box models" can be written to treat flows across and within ocean basins. Furthermore, other types of modelling can be interlinked, such as land use, allowing researchers to predict the interaction between climate and ecosystems.